The Japanese billionaire who commissioned SpaceX to launch a private mission around the moon on a Starship rocket abruptly canceled the project, citing lingering uncertainty about when the launch vehicle would be ready to fly.
“I signed the contract in 2018 on the assumption that dearMoon will be launched by the end of 2023,” said Yusaku Maezawa, a backer of the project, on X. “It’s a development project, so it is what it is, but it’s still uncertain, when can the starship take off.”
The dearMoon mission was first announced in 2018 – back when the Starship was known as the Big Falcon Rocket – and was to be the first launch of a starship to fly humans around the moon and back. At the time, both sides said they were targeting a 240,000-mile journey as early as 2023.
Maezawa announced the eight people who will accompany him on the mission in late 2022, with a crew including Everyday Astronaut’s Tim Dodd, South Korean idol TOP and music producer Steve Aoki. At that point, the plan publicly stated on dearMoon’s website still stuck to the 2023 timeline; but four years after the project was announced, it was very clear that the target launch date was unfeasible, given that the Starship had not yet completed a single test flight in orbit. The project was postponed indefinitely last November.
The cancellation appears to have come as a surprise to at least some of the crew. “Had I known it could have ended within a year and a half of publication, I never would have agreed to it,” Dodd said. “We didn’t know about this possibility in advance. I expressed my views, even before the announcement, that the expensive moon was unlikely to happen in the next few years.”
Irish photographer Rhiannon Adam, who was also chosen for the mission, was more trenchant: “As someone with a critical mind, a lot of it doesn’t make sense, especially given the timeline. I never believed we would go in 2023 or 2024,” she said.
Reports at the time suggested that SpaceX was eyeing space tourism as a way to fund the development of a massive, immensely complex rocket. While neither SpaceX nor Maezawa have ever disclosed the likely significant amount of the flight deposit, Musk said during an event announcing the mission that it was a “non-trivial amount that will have a material impact” on the rocket’s development costs.
But SpaceX’s business has changed considerably since 2018: since then, the company has achieved a number of impressive milestones, including certifying and flying its Dragon spacecraft with a crew for astronauts, bringing the Internet constellation of the Starlink satellite online, and increasing the launch cadence of the Falcon rocket. nearly 100 a year in 2023. (The company is on track to beat its own record this year.)
The company also won a landmark contract from NASA to use a version of the Starship as a lunar lander for the agency’s Artemis program, which undoubtedly greatly advanced SpaceX’s priorities. Space tourism had to give way to the interests of their single largest customer.
SpaceX’s valuation continues to climb, and investors’ appetite for SpaceX stock seems nearly insatiable. At the end of 2018, the company was valued at $30.5 billion; as of last month, it was reportedly considering a tender offer that could value the company at around $200 billion. Meanwhile, the space research and intelligence organization Payload Research estimated that SpaceX is likely to double its revenue in 2023 from the previous year to $8.7 billion.
Maezawa’s fortunes seem to have shifted as well. According to Forbes, his net worth is now $1.4 billion, just half of what it was at the time of dearMoon’s announcement. Maezawa also scratched his space itch in 2021 when he flew in a Russian Soyuz capsule on a 12-day trip to the International Space Station with private spaceflight company Space Adventures.